orders were sent to Governor Wyatt to prohibit all exchange with the people of Holland, as this diversion of tobacco from England diminished the volume of the royal customs. In 1623, Wyatt was thrown into a state of great doubt as to what course he ought to pursue, by the information received from the captain of an English vessel, that a Dutch ship which he had passed at sea had expressed an intention of making a voyage to Virginia to exchange supplies for its principal commodity.[1] The need of such supplies was now urgent. The financial inability of the Company had been fully set forth in its letter to the Governor and Council in the previous autumn, in which stress was also laid upon the discouragement of the adventurers in consequence of the failure of Mr. Blaney, the Cape Merchant, who had arrived at Jamestown in the Warwick in the previous year, to dispose of the goods in his charge except on credits which had not yet been collected.[2] The Company had by this time expended one hundred thousand pounds sterling in the Virginian enterprise without profit and without recovery of even a part of the capital invested.[3] In 1623, it was compelled in
- ↑ Governor Wyatt to John Ferrer, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. II, No. 26; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1623, p. 87, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Neill’s Virginia Company of London, pp. 355, 356.
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 144. In a petition to the King, presented in 1623 by the Somers Isles (Bermudas) and London Companies, it is stated that £200,000 had been expended in their plantation. British State Papers, Colonial, vol. II, No. 50; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1623, p. 158, Va. State Library.
